Have Your Cake Page 6

  She hadn’t been disappointed to discover he was a stray. His company had proven to be the answer to a loneliness she hadn’t realised she’d been harbouring. Now they belonged to each other.

  Abigail went into her bedroom, changed into her pyjamas, then shuffled out to the living room and dropped into the squashy couch that she’d bought cheap from some students moving out of the building. She dragged a pilled blanket covered in cat hair over herself, then logged onto her bank account on her phone.

  For a long time, Abigail just stared at the balance.

  Tolkien eventually joined her, licking gregariously at the corners of his mouth. He sat on her chest, his body completely obscuring the phone she held, and began to purr. Abigail smiled at him. She moved the phone around his body and held the screen up to his face.

  ‘See that?’ she said. ‘We’re almost there.’

  Tolkien regarded the rectangle of light then nudged her fingers.

  Abigail scratched his chin with her free hand and turned the screen towards herself. She was just one thousand pounds shy of her magic number.

  Lost in thoughts about ones and zeros and deep brown eyes, Abigail fell asleep where she lay, a small smile curving her mouth.

  (Before)

  Yellow

  When Abigail woke, she was alone. Because Mal was an early riser and Abigail didn’t really get going until mid-morning, this was not surprising. She turned in the sheets and smiled into his pillow. In the early days of their relationship Mal had tried waking her and enticing her with the day, but now he just got on with his business until she joined him. What that business was changed regularly. Some mornings she shuffled out in time for brunch to hear he’d played a round of golf. Other mornings he’d jogged around the lake, a full six miles. But mostly he sought out a friend or two for coffee and conversation. He was a regular at all of the main street cafes, and never short of someone willing to while away the hours.

  The people of Sheffield loved their Local Member as much as Abigail loved bed.

  She rolled onto her back and, eyes closed, chased the last details of a memory into the fog of her mind. She’d slept restlessly. Something was gnawing at the back of her mind, and it was manifesting in dark, convoluted dreams.

  Sitting up, she pushed her hair back from her face, caged her fingers over her mouth and took deep, cleansing breaths. When she felt steady, she slid from the bed and padded into the kitchen.

  But there was nothing and no-one there. All the breakfast ingredients were packed away and there was no morning paper spread out on the table. Mal had clearly not returned from wherever he’d gone to pass the hours, and when she checked the hallway clock, she was surprised to see it was much earlier than she usually woke.

  She returned to the bedroom and picked up her phone. There were no new messages.

  Abigail remembered Mal saying the night before that he wanted to catch up with Will. She texted Mal, asking if she was early enough to join them. He wouldn’t mind—a conversation with the County Council’s Head of Transport about the installation of a pedestrian crossing couldn’t last more than ten minutes at most, she wouldn’t be intruding.

  He didn’t respond immediately, which he usually did. There was no-one more affixed to their phone than her boyfriend—which was both highly convenient and enormously trying, depending on the situation—so this was surprising.

  She made the bed as she waited, then she sent a text to Will.

  Can I join you for brunch?

  She jumped in the shower, and five minutes later, with just a towel around her, her phone was in her hand again.

  Sounds great! The response from Will read. We’re at Jameson’s. Mal too?

  Mal too? So the ‘we’ in ‘we’re’ was presumably Will and his wife Kate. She opened the keyboard to reply, intending to apologise and leave Will to a private morning with his wife, when a new message came through.

  Sorry love, our food just arrived so I won’t be much longer. I’ll bring you something. Will says hi. Xx

  Abigail stared at her phone screen. Her mind was rolling sluggishly from side to side, trying to make sense of what these two pieces of information, when combined, meant. Will was willing to make his party of two a party of four. And her boyfriend was not where he claimed to be.

  Mal was lying to her.

  She dressed quickly.

  That feeling of wrongness that had followed her out of sleep was pressing on her skin now, just like the clothes she wore, although heavier. Like snow gear, the feeling was bulky and restrictive, and impossible to ignore.

  She checked Facebook. He hadn’t posted, and she could see in their chat window that he hadn’t been active in over three hours. It was ten o’clock now. What had he been doing all this time that he hadn’t had the chance to go on social media? He was terrible for it; during tea, during conversations, but not during whatever this was that had so completely secured his attention.

  Abigail pressed her hand to her abdomen and closed her eyes.

  This was a bad morning.

  An hour later, Mal’s Audi turned into the driveway. Abigail watched from the kitchen window as he parked, killed the engine, then reached over to the passenger seat for what looked like a small grease-stained paper bag, presumably containing the brunch she no longer had an appetite for.

  He didn’t see her watching him, so he didn’t know she saw him spray himself with something removed from the glove box. He checked his reflection in the sun-visor mirror and wiped at something on the corner of his mouth. A piece of breakfast, perhaps. Maybe a smudge of lipstick.

  Abigail’s stomach was churning. There was a confrontation coming. She’d paced and rationalised, even talked herself out of the thoughts that had moved so heavily into her mind. But she’d been alone too long. She’d waited so long that the thoughts had come back, and now there was no way she couldn’t ask the questions that were like crackle rocks on her tongue.

  Confrontations always made her feel a bit sick.

  Not that she’d had many with Mal.

  They’d been together for years, so of course there had been the typical squabbles about dishes and money and how to spend their annual leave days. But they’d never really fought. She’d felt blessed about that, but not now. Now she just felt ill-prepared.

  He was singing when he opened the front door and stepped inside. Something soft and impossible to make out from where she stood in the kitchen, and it incensed her. Here she was, losing her mind, tripping and scrabbling on the shifting foundations of their relationship, and he was singing?

  Her anger gave her courage.

  ‘How was your morning?’ Her voice was a shade off normal, but he was too distracted to notice.

  ‘Good,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Will didn’t want to talk business so I’ll have to corner him at the office, but there were fresh scones, so it was hardly a wasted trip.’ He set his umbrella down—intermittent spring showers had been forecast but he looked to have escaped them—and moved towards the kitchen. He held the brown paper bag up. ‘I got you some pastries.’

  Abigail recognised the label. ‘You went to The Rude Shipyard?’

  ‘My favourite fresh bread in town.’

  Except Will had been at Jameson’s Café & Tea Rooms, known for its homemade cakes. And an inconvenient six blocks from Shipyard.

  Mal came within reach of her, the bag still extended between them, but she didn’t take it.

  A small crease appeared between his thick, expressive eyebrows.

  Mal wasn’t good looking. No-one would look twice at him to model clothes, despite his slim, muscular frame. His face was too angular and his eyes were too close together. Not obviously so, but just a fraction too close. Enough to make your mind register the faintest sense of a predatory nature. She noticed them most when he was fixated on a goal.

  But he was captivating. He was like a Dalí picture: the longer you looked the more detail you noticed. He had a prominent, square chin and a proud, high nose. His lips wer
e highly irregular. The cleft of his upper lip was so defined it seemed to have been pushed down in the middle with a pencil. Everything about him was just a degree or two off common, but the combination somehow worked, and it could hold the eye. He was commanding in Parliament; both with his words and with the testosterone that seemed to wear him. And he was commanding now, because his instincts, Abigail saw, had registered the need to be.

  He set the bag down. ‘Something wrong?’

  Abigail crossed her arms. She lifted her chin and hoped her voice didn’t betray her. ‘So you were with Will at Shipyard.’

  Mal regarded her. At length, he pressed his fingers together in an upside-down steeple. He wasn’t foolish enough to confirm what he’d already claimed. His alibi was broken, and he knew it.

  Voice infinitely less affected than her own, he said, ‘How big is this conversation?’

  ‘How big is the lie?’ she countered.

  He didn’t answer.

  ‘What do you do every morning?’ she asked. ‘Really do. When you’re unsupervised and unchecked. When your stupid girlfriend is sleeping.’

  ‘I wait for her to wake up.’

  She’d insulted herself, but had he just agreed with the insult by not contradicting it? He didn’t give her time to think about that, because he changed the game.

  ‘What do you do while I’m out, then?’ He took a single step forward, and for the first time since one bad date years ago, she withdrew from him. There was so much menace in the approach, and it made her thoughts scatter from offence to defence. It made her think of the counter against her back and the wall behind that. It made her wish for a way out.

  She should have done this out on the street. Or over the phone. She shouldn’t have isolated herself in this house, where no-one would know if this conversation went wrong.

  Strength. Strength or submission. She could back down, that would take the scorching coal out of his eyes. Or she could push.

  A lifetime of protective instinct warred with the character she’d shaped within herself.

  She pushed.

  ‘I sleep,’ she said. ‘Don’t try to put this on me. You lied about where you were and who you were with. What else have you lied about?’

  Something changed. In his eyes, in the line of his jaw and the pressure between his lips. Something small, but it made an enormous difference to … something. Her pulse slowed a fraction, and the nerves under the skin of her arms no longer felt shot through with caffeine. She knew he was going to apologise a second before his mouth moved.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ He spread his long-fingered hands wide, palms up, and his shoulders came forward in the slightest bow—a kind of submissive gesture that was so unlike him. ‘You’re right. I lied today. I promise, every other morning I have been truthful. But today I was not.’

  Abigail swallowed.

  ‘I wasn’t with Will. But I wasn’t with anyone else.’ He hesitated. ‘I mean … Well, there were people there, of course.’

  Her lips pressed together in building agitation.

  Seeing this, he held up his supplicant hands. ‘I was shopping.’

  ‘Shopping where? What did you buy?’ She made a show of examining his empty hands, which he dropped to his sides.

  ‘I didn’t buy anything.’

  ‘Really? Window shopping?’ She pushed away from the counter and attempted to step around him. She didn’t have to listen to this. Mal wasn’t a window shopper any more than she was a practicing accountant. It was time to act on this undercurrent in their relationship. This inexplicable wrongness and unshakable sense of wavering restraint. She didn’t feel it all the time, but it was sometimes there between them. There was something about Mal that could make her pulse quicken—and not in the good way.

  ‘Wait.’ He blocked her path, arms up in supplication again. ‘Stop, please. I really can explain but I’d rather not.’

  Her laugh was an ugly thing, and maybe it was that which finally got through to him, because his expression changed again. It became … resigned. He extended a hand towards her.

  She didn’t take it.

  ‘I’ll show you,’ he said. ‘Let’s get in the car. I’ll take you to where I was then you’ll understand everything.’

  Her instinct warred with her trust. Years with this man. Getting in a car with him, being alone with him—it shouldn’t have given her a second’s pause. And yet it did. Because he’d lied to her? Or because of that mad look in his eyes?

  Her hesitation felt like an age—an awkward stretch of time that pulled and pulled and pulled at their relationship. But when she nodded, only a few seconds had passed.

  The drive was another pull on their relationship, and as she sat there in the passenger seat, wondering at her own elasticity, she wondered how things had spiralled so quickly. Had they been on a knife-edge this whole time, and she’d not realised?

  They drove into the centre of town and parked. Mal reached for her hand when he rounded the car to walk with her. She couldn’t yet decide if he’d done something to warrant the shun, so she let herself be held, and then led. Along Surrey Street past the clock tower and the Sheffield Bank, over Leopold Road and Barker Street, then through the pillared entrance of H.L. Brown & Son.

  Her already labouring heart moved from a canter into a jog.

  Smartly dressed men and women smiled at the couple standing in the doorway. Their hands were folded over their middles, and the display cases they each stood behind were flawlessly clean. Everything that glittered and shone seemed to reach for the overhead lights, and there was music playing, but it was so soft she could only know it was there, but know none of its detail.

  Mal paused long enough for her to glance about the room, her lips parted, then he guided her towards display counters full of diamonds.

  The woman behind them uncrossed her arms and stepped forward. Her smile widened. ‘Good morning,’ she said. ‘Can I help you with anything?’

  Mal ignored her. ‘This,’ he said to Abigail, ‘is where I was all morning.’

  The woman’s smile faltered.

  Abigail opened her mouth to return the greeting—it cost nothing to be polite, after all—but then the woman met her eyes, and for some reason, all the niceties left Abigail’s mind. She blinked at the woman, confused, then she looked up at Mal.

  ‘You were window shopping for rings?’

  There was a small smile on his lips that hadn’t been there before. He nodded. Just the once.

  ‘I …’ He hesitated, then looked towards the third person in their party. ‘Could we have a moment, please? I’m sorry to ask you to step away from your workstation, but I would be grateful.’

  The woman glanced at Abigail, then stepped away without a word.

  Abigail’s mind was racing. This had been the cause of his deception? He’d been looking at engagement rings? It made sense now why he’d chosen Will for an alibi, as he’d been planning to see him anyway, and why he’d been so slow to develop a second alibi when his first one had collapsed. How unlucky for him that this was the morning, of all mornings, that Abigail had woken early.

  Mal took both of her hands in his. He pulled them towards him until there was a knot of fingers against his stomach.

  ‘Abby, I’ve been thinking about us, and lately I’ve wanted more. I was going to get you one of these and surprise you next week at the Member and Constituents Dinner, but I confess, I got overwhelmed. So maybe all of this madness this morning will prove to be a good thing. Now you can pick your own.’ He lifted one of her hands to his mouth and kissed it. His gaze never faltered. ‘If you want to, of course.’

  ‘If I want to pick one?’

  This was a pleasant surprise. And a welcome one. They’d never specifically discussed marriage—Mal’s blossoming career had always been the main short-term focus, but it had certainly been assumed that they would further commit in time.

  She felt silly now. She’d blown everything this morning so wildly out of proportion, and she wasn’t
usually a suspicious kind of person. Stress, she thought. Her job at the multi-national graphic design company downtown had been a series of unrealistic deadlines of late. So … stress.

  The diamonds created dancing rainbows out of the corners of her eyes. When she looked towards them they were all dazzle and glitter and promise. Yellow gold, rose gold, white gold. Princess cut, heart cut, radiant cut. Some of them were paired with matching wedding bands, and others stood alone, glorious and show-stopping and maybe even one of a kind.

  ‘If you want to marry me,’ Mal murmured, drawing her eyes back to his. His smile widened. He still had her hands. He pulled them against him again. ‘Abby, will you do me the honour? Will you be my wife?’

  Her mother would be ecstatic. Abigail couldn’t think of a single one of her friends who would disapprove—hell, they liked Mal more than they liked her now. There was only her sister, on the other side of the world, who didn’t know and love this man. There surely wasn’t an eligible woman in Sheffield who would hesitate on this question, so why should Abigail?

  When Abigail and Mal left H.L. Brown & Son, Abigail was sporting a four carat yellow gold ring on her finger.

  Chapter 4

  The cupcake bride

  Hell no. Hell no to summer rain and the millions of little raindrops that would spoil everything. Abigail pressed her cheek against the shop window and glared at the brooding sky.

  Bollocks.

  ‘We could reschedule,’ Brittany said doubtfully. When Abigail rounded on her she put her arms above her head, hands wide. ‘Or string up a really big tarp.’

  Abigail thought of the hundreds of cupcakes piped yesterday and this morning, and really didn’t want to reschedule. What she wanted was a colossal fan that she could aim at the rainclouds.